


[Art] Saudade

by architeuthis, TKodami



Category: Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, DC Cinematic Universe, Man of Steel (2013)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Digital Art, Fanart, Fanwork of Fanwork, Gotham City - Freeform, Kansas, M/M, Metropolis, The Kent Farm, cityscapes, landscapes, superbat big bang, watercolor
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-30
Updated: 2017-07-30
Packaged: 2018-12-08 18:21:26
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 2,029
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11652102
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/architeuthis/pseuds/architeuthis, https://archiveofourown.org/users/TKodami/pseuds/TKodami
Summary: It's midsummer, 2006. In the wake of his son's death, Bruce Wayne tries to outrun his grief on a cross-country road trip. When his car breaks down on a dusty road in the heart of Kansas, a friendly stranger stops to lend a hand.Artwork for the 2017 Superbat Big Bang.





	1. Finished Art & Sketch

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Saudade](https://archiveofourown.org/works/11484096) by [Steals_Thyme (Liodain)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Liodain/pseuds/Steals_Thyme). 



> We picked this story up as a pinch-hit, but it was an honor, because Liodain's story is gorgeous. There are some very mild spoilers in the commentary, so we recommend reading the fic first. You won't regret it.

  
Banner art. [Click here to enlarge.](http://i.imgur.com/FoMcSjM.png) Sketch and typography by TKodami, colors by architeuthis.

  
Plot-relevant emoji, by TKodami.

  
Bruce and Clark texting. [Click here to enlarge.](http://i.imgur.com/6XS85F8.png) By TKodami.


	2. Progress Shots & Artist's Commentary

**TK:** In the beginning of this collaboration, one of the ideas I pitched to you was doing DCEU Clark and Bruce in a Jim Lee-style diptych. The two of them in superhero regalia, in their different cities, superhero-ing (like you do). I had also pitched a different idea of one of them looking at a phone -- again, another hand shot, so we could maybe get Clark looking at the alien-in-the-corn emoji.

When we realized that we’d have no time to do the twelve pieces of art we wanted to do for Lio, you had the idea of synthesizing the two together: the two of them looking at their phones, maybe lighted by their phones in the diptych configuration. So we have you to thank for this sketch.

 **Squid:** Thank god I was here.

 **TK:** As far as I can tell, that thing that Bruce’s face is doing is a smile. That’s what a smile looks like on Bruce’s face. I once again apologize, formally, for drawing Henry Cavill laughing.

 **Squid:** Friendship over.

 **TK:** At least Lio was happy. xD

 **TK:** In this case the lack of time was the mother of necessity. From two elaborate ideas -- we were like “No, we can’t fucking do that,” so we’re down to the two of them leaning against matching walls, with what I hope will be a very painterly splash of color for their backgrounds. I’m really excited to see how these turn out. Right now they feel very centered on the emotion that they’re both feeling, but I know that once color becomes involved it’s going to be way more fascinating -- especially once you get phone lighting into it.

 **Squid:** Flattery will get you nowhere. You heard it here first, folks: this piece will be getting color as soon as my schedule lets up on me, in the same style as the banner.

**TK:** The Alien In the Corn was a joke that I couldn’t resist. And rather than use corn emoji that already exist, why not -- say -- design a corn emoji from the ground up, and render it semi-realistically with a lot of color fields and stippling?

 **Squid:** This is not a conversation any reasonable person has ever had with themself, TK.

 **TK:** The alien is what I assume gray alien iconography would look like in a world that _also_ has Kirby-esque aliens with their motherboxes and New Genesis hover bikes and whatnot appearing periodically around the world.

 **Squid:** My first thought was DCAU Brainiac, but I’m so delighted by the idea of a universe where the Kirby aesthetic is just part of the cultural iconography.

**Squid:** Tell me about this sketch, TK. How does a composition happen?

 **TK:** DRINK TEA, SCREAM INTERNALLY, AND SKETCH THINGS ON A TABLET.

 **Squid:** _Magic_. [jazz hands]

 **TK:** Once I had the “phone in a hand” idea (because phones actually play an important role in Lio’s fic), I closed my eyes, entered the “deadline is rushing up fast” trance, and tried to sketch out an idea that I thought would be easy to paint. I, um, may have actually just made the composition more difficult by breaking the image into three disparate parts.

 **Squid:** You 100% did, so thanks for that.

 **TK:** But look at the tiny boats!

**Squid:** I’m guessing the brackets and the sans serif were inspired by the texting conceit, which I was _obsessed_ with when we were talking about this fic and what we were doing for it. Do people know that this story has an epistolary component? GUYS. GO READ.

 **TK:** I actually started designing the title before I knew anything about the fic. I started with the feeling that the title itself had; and the tone of Lio’s past fic -- I tend to think of Lio as an elegant, subtle writer. (I can hear her laughter from here.) So the decision for the sans serif -- in particular, a Deco-inspired serif -- came from familiarity with her prose. Once we began brainstorming what to do for this fic, and I discovered how important texting was to the story, the brackets idea came from a convention that translators used for manga. In Japanese media fandoms, titles that were translated from one medium into another (or one language into another) were set off with brackets. 

**Squid:** What brought about the little curve in the D?

 **TK:** Funny story: when I dropped the outline version of the title on you, it had that little curl on the D:

But before it got to this stage, every letter had a little curly bit on it. The S had a curled serif, the middle bars of the As curled inward. Even the E had a little flourish on it. Essentially, what I was _attempting_ to do, was to mesh some of flourishes seen on geometric fonts with the elegance of a Deco grotesque (the technical term for the overall sans serif style from the late 1800s to about 1950). As this font is _far_ thicker, wider, and flatter than an original deco font would have been -- and because its pretty straight-laced -- I wanted to make this font have what I thought were “little ties fluttering in the wind”.

 **Squid:** My god, the little curve has a secret backstory more elaborate and wonderful than I had imagined. You pared the curves back to just the right amount of elaboration.

 **TK:** Success! 

**TK:** I decided in the end that the font needed to be less whimsical, and more austere, so it wouldn’t compete for attention with the final banner design. Designing this type was fun; I don’t often get to use Deco influences in my designs. But Lio’s fic feels a bit like it’s out of time. Bruce’s Bentley. The Kent Farm That Cellphone Towers Forgot. The callbacks to Bruce’s childhood. Deco design felt entirely right for that kind of gentle nostalgia.


	3. More Progress Shots & More Artist's Commentary

**Squid:** This is me splorting down both skies and the first two layers of the hand. You’ll see me cutting the corn out of the Kansas sky later, but I don't think I did the moon that way -- I don’t think I ever fully filled it in. I struggled with the terminus for ... twelve or thirteen hours of my life. Maybe a little less? No, probably not.

 **TK:** Why was the moon so tricky?

 **Squid:** It’s apparently really difficult to capture the degree of sharpness that the terminus has without just making the moon look like a weird oval in the sky. I had to fiddle with the hardness/softness of that edge a lot before it started looking like a moon.

**Squid:** Fake watercolor plays out a lot like real watercolor. Watercolorists use a peel-off masking liquid called frisket to keep areas of the paper white when they’re doing washes. What I’ve done on the left is lay down my sky and then cut the corn and barn roof out of it with an eraser, but I think of it much the same way. On Bruce’s hand, I’ve layered on more shading, building toward black, which is also a very natural-watercolor technique. On the right, I’ve filled in the silhouettes from the sketch, but you can see I haven’t figured out what I’m doing with the water yet.

 **TK:** Moving the sun down to the horizon was a good choice. Originally it was up in the sky to provide more of a direct reflection to the moon rising over the Kent farm barn--but now it feels more of a contrasting composition.

**Squid:** As the focal point of the composition, the phone is also the simplest part. Naturally. The screen’s about four layers, two of which are just duplicated and overlayed to create that blurry effect. That look’s based heavily on the glitchy/distorted Zod transmission that we see in *Man of Steel*. The background pattern is just quick strokes with a textured flat bristle brush. Then I cut out the world icon -- which entailed basically repainting it, since the original sketch is a flat image -- and masked it out of the noise.

 **TK:** I’m pleased that the world icon reappeared in the composition at this stage. 

**Squid:** It turns out it’s really hard to copy someone else's world map. The original looks great and this one looks like [descending slide whistle sound]. The small size and the visual noise around it helps disguise that, and in turn, the icon saves the screen from looking like plaid.

 **TK:** Agreed. ~~At this stage of the fic, it would be strange for Bruce to change his background to Clark’s plaid. Maybe in a sequel.~~

 **Squid:** (Clark changes his background to a photo of a pile of money.)

 **Squid:** Anyway, on the left here I’ve added some color, and on the right I’ve turned off the foreground silhouette so you can see the several layers of roughly building-shaped strokes I’ve layered in over there.

**Squid:** Almost every edge in this image was created with the eraser. When I use this technique, it's easier to paint big and then cut it back to the edge rather than paint up to the edge. This is what gives those vertical and horizontal boundaries, especially, that rough wiggly naturalism. Every new layer gets this treatment separately, because layer masks don’t count as edges for wet edges in Paint Tool SAI.

 **TK:** I’m curious--why did you choose colors that are normally associated with Gotham (green, purple, gray, dark reds) for Kansas, and warm reds, blues, and golds for Gotham? 

**Squid:** Mostly _because_ art usually gives you the reverse. Especially in Superbat art, which contrasts Bruce’s and Clark’s iconography a lot, Clark’s imagery tends to be very wholesome and downhome and Bruce’s is very moody and sinister. The story gives us significant night and day scenes in both settings, so I thought it’d create some interesting tension to flip those things around. And everyone likes a spooky cornfield.

 **TK:** That barn looks haunted.

 **Squid:** I don't want to spoil anything, but there might be some alien shit in that barn.

**Squid:** Here I’ve punched up the colors in the Kansas sky and used an adjustment layer to push more purples into the hand. For the stars I used what I believe is referred to internationally as “the TK method”: laid them down with a splatter brush and then went in with a tiny round brush and pulled out the points on a couple.

 **TK:** So I've noticed that this city could be read as Metropolis or Gotham. 

**Squid:** Yeah! Or -- realistically, there’s probably nowhere you can stand where you’re looking across water (the foreground) at Gotham (the dark middleground) with Metropolis rising in the distance, but that would make a lot of symbolic sense too.

 **TK:** Oh, I hadn't thought of that. That's a fantastic reading of the cities.

 **Squid:** I leave the implications of a sunrise in Clark’s colors stealing over Gotham as an exercise for the reader.

**Squid:** And here’s the final version with color adjustments and your paper texture work.

 **TK:** I guess this is the point where we acknowledge that all of the work that's gone into essentially a fic banner. ... I really like the stars that were added to the sky in Kansas. The barn was spooky, but then you added the stars and I wanted to _be_ there.

 **Squid:** Good! I wanted that side to be a little inviting, and to stand up to the city side, which for a while there was outdoing it. The phone got a bit of star treatment as well. I felt like it needed a little something in the dark spot.

 **Squid:** … I basically just ignored your sketch.

 **TK:** You preserved the main compositional elements of the sketch: the corn, the barn, the moon, the hand, the city... When I gave this thumbnail to you, I had it in my mind that this would be an easy, simple composition; and an easy, simple painting. Instead, it became [GIANT PIECE OF ART.] So, just, well done -- this piece is gorgeous. 

**Squid:** [champagne clink]


End file.
